Posts Tagged ‘Streaming Content’

Even though they seem to, at times, be mostly in the business of making their customers angry, Netflix is still one of the best places to get your movie and TV content from. In fact, their streaming service is one of the most popular available.

One of the ways Netflix is going to keep that service popular, and growing, is with updates to it and the applications that make it possible. That’s just what they’ve done this week with the user interface for their Android application.

The company explained that the revamped UI now displays twice as many movie and TV titles, with larger cover art, and that users can easily swipe through titles to find additional content.

“In the last 12 months we have seen a threefold increase in how long Netflix members are watching on their tablets,” Netflix chief product officer Neil Hunt said. The company also said they wanted to introduce the redesigned UI in time for the release of Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet.

Netflix said the update will be available for iPad users “in a few weeks.” The update is free and is available now in the Android Market.

What do you do if you’ve managed to make your once struggling DVD rental-by-mail company into one of, if not the, biggest rental and content streaming services in the world? Well, if you’re Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, you make some poor decisions regarding pricing, apologize for them and split off your DVD rental biz into a completely different company.

That’s just what Reed has done with Netflix’s DVD rental business. He announced this week via the company’s blog that the Netflix will split its DVD and streaming video businesses and rebrand the DVD division as “Qwikster.”

“In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success,” Hastings said in the blog post. “Now I see that given the huge changes we have been recently making, I should have personally given a full justification to our members of why we are separating DVD and streaming, and charging for both,” Hastings added.

I guess Hastings felt he had to do something what with all the backlash recently over the recently rolled out price hike of 60% which helped drop the company’s stock by almost 50%. Not only that but Starz has also has not renewed its deal with the company which means fewer movies and other content for the service.

Qwikster will be a separate company and will, in addition to movies and TV programs, also offer video game rentals. Expect to see Qwikster.com to go live in the next few weeks.

So, what do we think of this? Is it a good move or the last gasp of a dying company out of touch with customers? Sound off in the comments.

The online content streaming landscape just got a bit more interesting as Amazon announced late Thursday it has made a deal with NBCUniversal to provide 1,000 Universal Pictures movies to its streaming customers. The new content includes films such as Being John Malkovich, The Jetsons, Flipper, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Billy Elliott. Well, that’s quite a cross-section of content.

This new deal is in addition to the one Amazon recently made for it to offer CBS shows such as Star Trek and Cheers to its customers. All these deals for content make perfect sense if you think Amazon is about to release a tablet in the next few months.

It’s widely been speculated that said tablet would be coming out and give users access to the company’s Amazon Unbox, Amazon Mp3, Kindle, Cloud Music and Cloud Drive services. All of that and a well done tablet powered by Android could, potentially, take a bite out of Apple’s iPad dominance. We’ll see.

According to Bloomberg, struggling Internet-based film and TV streaming service Hulu is looking for a buyer. One of the companies supposedly in the running for the service and considering a purchase is Apple.

In case you’re not up on the current Hulu situation, in July the company announced that it had hired Morgan Stanley and Guggenheim Partners to assist with a the sale and rumor was that Yahoo! and, possibly Microsoft and Amazon, were interested.

However, it seems Apple may be the frontrunner now. Although, at this time, no company has made an actual bid for Hulu.

A Hulu purchase may seem like a good thing for Apple. They’ve already got iTunes but Hulu would allow them a better way to compete with streaming services like Netflix since, at the moment, you can only purchase or rent videos from within iTunes.

Something to keep in mind, though, is that Apple isn’t really know for acquiring companies. They are just as likely to take an idea and spin it and launch a new service of their own as an addition or enhancement of their existing service. Plus, Hulu only has about 1 million subscribers at the moment and that’s not really all that many.